Recently, I had the pleasure to correspond with Ayelet Tsabari, whose debut short story collection, The Best Place on Earth, won the 2015 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and was a 2016 Editor’s Choice in The New York Times.
Born to a family of Yemeni descent in Israel, Tsabari is also a documentarian, and one of her films won an award at the Palm Spring International Short Film Festival. She now lives in Toronto, in “a lovely neighborhood downtown that is very community oriented.” Here we talk about her book, which challenges the dominant male Ashkenazi narrative prevalent in Israel; the restlessness of Tel Aviv; and “the grandness and passion of those early friendships” between teenage girls that, when over, leave us burned out yet wistful.
Rosebud Ben-Oni: In “Say it Again, Say Something Else,” a seemingly natural yet ultimately complicated relationship develops between two very different young women, Lily and Lana. While there’s a whole host of themes here—coming-of-age, immigration, racial tensions, homosexuality—what struck me as most significant in this story are those of loyalty and betrayal, especially at the story’s end. Growing up in Israel, did you have any similar encounters?
Ayelet Tsabari: I find friendships between teenage girls fascinating, even when they’re not further complicated by the other factors you mentioned. So yes, I had similar—yet very different— encounters as a girl. They were similar in their emotional intensity, the love was so consuming, and the betrayal was crushing. I remember telling one of my friends (who has remained my friend to this day) that she was dead to me and really meaning it. She still has the letter I wrote to her, in which I dramatically mourned her. Sometimes I miss the grandness and passion of those early friendships.
RB: My favorite story was “The Poets in the Kitchen Window,” set during Operation Storm; as a poet myself, young Uri, already in bullied in school for writing verse despite “having never heard of a Yemeni or Iraqi poet, or any Mizrahi poet,” resonated with my own early schooling in which Latina/o poets and other poets of color were largely excluded. Did have the same experiences in school? Who were your favorite authors growing up?
AT: Uri is close to my heart as well. Like Uri, and like you, I never read Mizrahi writers or writers of color growing up, and never found myself or my family reflected in the books they assigned to us in school. I actually believed that there were no published Yemeni writers in Israel (of course they existed but I didn’t know that, because they had not received media attention, and were not taught in schools). It made me feel as though our stories weren’t worth telling and as though my dream of becoming a writer myself was far-fetched. The exclusion of Mizrahi writers (and Palestinian writers) in the school curriculum, to me, is an act of erasure that has yet to be rectified, and one which puts limitations on children’s dreams. It infuriates me. So as a result, my favorite poets growing up were all male and Ashkenazi, like Yehuda Amichai (whom I still love), Natan Zach, David Avidan.
RB: In “Causalities,” I had a lot of empathy for Yael, who, at the very beginning, cheats on her boyfriend Oren (who’s stationed in Gaza and dealing with his own fears) with a complete stranger in the bathroom of a bar and then, without understanding why herself, gives him a forged gimel form to get out of the army for a couple of days. And that although she tries to escape her past, it follows her right to Tel Aviv, agitating her—whether at work, when a friend of a woman she’d wronged “jabbed [her] veins so many times that [Yael] still [had] scars,” or at home, where, even with “the shutter closed to block out the heat and noise,” one still hears the city, particular Allenby street’s never-ending noise: “buses and people and cars and sirens and vendors and street cats and taxis and car alarms. In the evenings, when it cools down, we open thein windows and the city barges into our home.” And even though Oren seems to be devoted her, and needs her, she can’t seem to be there to return his calls? Is it perhaps because of these agitations, whether past or present, that Yael is someone who is never quite there, no matter how loud the city, no matter how disloyal her actions?
AT: I think Yael’s desensitized behavior has a lot to do with where and how she grew up, in a southern town often hit by missiles—a war zone. I see her behavior as a defense tactic. Not to mention the war she’s witnessed at home, between her parents. She is a young woman who had been toughened by her circumstances, and that’s why I think she has such little patience for Oren’s displays of weakness. To me, writing about Yael was also a good way to write about how life in Israel, and the mandatory army, can shape people—women specifically—who feel a need to “act tough” in order to survive. I think you can see it with other female characters in the collection as well: I’ve been told before that the women in the collection are strong, assertive, sexually aggressive—these are characteristics one might associate with men. And on the flip side of it, I was interested in Israeli Jewish ideal of manliness, and its impact on people’s lives, especially when they are not naturally inclined toward these prescribed roles. Many of my male characters—men like Oren, Uri, or David in “Below Sea Level”—challenge the stereotypical Israeli man image.
RB: The collection ends with the title story, “The Best Place on Earth,” which takes places in both Vancouver and Jerusalem and in which Naomi, upon discovering her husband’s past indiscretion, goes to visit her sister Tamar’s home on Hornby Island. You yourself live in Toronto now. Why did you choose Toronto? Do you see yourself ever returning to Israel for good?
AT: I moved to Toronto from Vancouver after I was accepted to an MFA in Creative Writing here. I love Toronto; it’s a great city, diverse, vibrant, and safe, and I live in a lovely neighborhood downtown that is very community-oriented. But my family and I are actually at a crossroad these days: we don’t know if there’s a future for us here, as we don’t have a family in the city, and now that I have a child, it seems more important than ever before. So I honestly don’t know where we might end up. Most of my family still lives in Israel and I miss it terribly. Mostly the people, but also the place itself, the colors and smells of it, the warm weather and the Mediterranean Sea. I feel quite torn. I guess, like many of my characters, I am still searching for my place.
RB: I was struck by how close Naomi and Tamar are, particularly by the image of “two girls in nightgowns under a long streetlight, the sounds of fighting and crying from their home faint, blending with the buzz of traffic and mosquitos and television sets from other homes.” Their ritual of smashing plates against the walls of Mahane Yehuda market in Jeursalem and then against that of the Co-op on Gailano Island seemed to be both an act of rebellion against and release from the pain caused by loved ones. You grew up in a large family. Did you and your siblings have this kind of closeness?
AT: Yes, which goes back to why I can’t seem to shake Israel off. I grew up in a close knit family—I have five siblings—and despite the geographical distance we remain close. I really miss the physical closeness, though, the everyday, the frequent visits, the Friday night dinners and Saturday morning jichnoon. I often wonder, just like Tamar in that story, how my life might have been like had I stayed in Israel. In fact, I have tried to create a sense of family everywhere I’ve been, and that’s why community is so important to me.
RB: I’ve lived in Jerusalem as well, and there is so much more to the city than what the media portrays, a beauty in a “hard, raw and broken way. How it felt alive, a kind of beast, pulsating, breathing, vibrating under [Naomi]’s feet.” I don’t know if it’s a hate/love kind of relationship, but there’s also a beautiful, bitter truth of the contradiction of belonging there when Naomi watches the aftermath of a bombing on the TV and finds she doesn’t miss “this” and yet “she couldn’t even fathom living anywhere else.” I find this akin to being Jewish, in a sense; that no matter how much you try to distance yourself from the religion, the culture, Israel, you will never completely sever this tie. I’m wondering if in the end, what is “the most beautiful place on earth” is not Jerusalem itself but this eternal tie that binds Israel to the diaspora?
AT: I totally agree about the inability to distance ourselves from our identity, from our Jewishness, and in my case, my Mizrahi-ness too, which is something I tried distancing myself from as a child and a teenager. But as far as the enteral tie between Israel and the diaspora, I think you’re coming at it from a diasporic perspective, if you know what I mean. Your tie to Israel and my tie to Israel are obviously different. I cannot fully understand the way Jews in the world feel about Israel, because Israel isn’t a metaphorical home to me but an actual home, the place of my childhood. Does this make any sense? Your question did make me think, though, if maybe the best place is the in-betweeness, or the search for a home and a belonging, which is a very Jewish theme, or the act of wandering, the movement between places. In my twenties I wanted to believe that. I romanticized wandering and wore my nomadic lifestyle on my head like a crown, but it wasn’t a sustainable choice and eventually I got tired of travelling and living without some stability. So what is the best place on earth, then? Ultimately, the place where you feel most at home. In my case, it might have to be wherever my husband and child are. And other times, or actually at the same time, it is the page.